Empty Smiles, page 3
Coco was shooting him worried looks. He closed his mouth before he said anything else. Even though his parents hadn’t done anything wrong, it was hard not to be mad at them. To be mad at every grown-up who worried about ordinary things, while he and Coco and Phil carried around their fear, waiting all alone.
His mom stopped zipping up the cooler. “Don’t you dare talk to your father like that! We don’t know what we’re talking about? Then why don’t you tell us, young man? What do we need to be worried about? Huh? Tell us that, Brian!”
The answer ran through his head, so loud he was almost surprised his mom didn’t pick the words right out of his brain. Ollie’s alive, somewhere. There’s a—a person who’s playing games with us. Game after game, and we don’t know how to end it. We’re scared he’ll get us, we’re scared we won’t see Ollie again. I’m so freaking scared, Mom.
But he didn’t say any of that. Once, by accident, Mr. Adler had slipped with them into the smiling man’s world. He had almost died. Brian would do anything to keep that from happening to his parents.
His mom pressed her lips together. She looked sad. “Get in the car, Brian. Right now. We’re going.”
Brian went. The last thing he saw was Coco’s wide-eyed face. “Talk to you soon,” she said.
He nodded.
The last thing he heard was the faint wail of police sirens in the distance.
3
TIM WAS SHAKING. Coco heard his teeth chatter, even though her mom and Ollie’s dad loaded him up with T-shirts and dry towels. He wouldn’t eat, even though they offered him his choice of baked goods from their cooler. He drank a little soda. And he shook.
“What happened to him, do you think?” Coco’s mom whispered to Mr. Adler, in the breathless moment after people started to clear out and before the police sirens could be heard.
Mr. Adler shook his head. “Let’s let him be, Zelda. At least until there’s someone he trusts and a properly trained psychologist around.”
Coco understood where Mr. Adler was coming from, but she really wished that Tim would—
Suddenly Tim blurted, “Ruth’s still there. It was dark. He wouldn’t let me stay with her. I would have. The girl said she was sorry.”
Coco’s head slewed around. “What girl?”
“Coco—” her mother began.
Tim just looked blank. “Girl.”
“Was she—what did she look like?”
“She looked sad. Then she looked mad. She was yelling at someone. But I couldn’t see . . .”
“Was she—”
“Enough, Coco! Let’s not stress him out, okay?” her mom said. Tim was shaking harder than ever. Ollie’s dad and Coco’s mom exchanged bleak looks.
“It’s okay, Tim. You’re safe now,” Mr. Adler said.
“No!” Tim tugged on Mr. Adler’s shirt, like a little kid desperate to make them understand. “You’re not safe. No one is safe.” He cringed into his layers of towel. “It’s getting dark soon, isn’t it? They come for you in the dark. They’ll hang you up with Ruth.”
A chill like a cold finger snaked down Coco’s back. She glanced at the sky. The sun was tilting, but there was still time left until full dark—summer nights were short.
“Tim,” she tried again. Both her mom and Ollie’s dad gave her warning looks—Why are you bothering him, Coco? We thought you knew better. Coco ignored them. “I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, but this is really important. What is coming?”
The sirens got louder.
She didn’t think Tim would answer. Then—“They laugh when you scream. Their eyes shine in the dark. That’s all I—” He shuddered. “I couldn’t move. Then the nice man said I could go but I had to remember. Ghost, mirror, gate. You need light. Three keys, and oh God,” His voice changed. “Is it going to be dark soon? Is it? They’re coming! We have to hide. We have to hide!”
“Easy,” Coco’s mom said, trying to calm him. “It’s okay. We’re all okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. The flashing lights of the police cars reflected red and blue off the water. There was the sound of footsteps on the path from the road, and then Tim Jenkins started to scream. He screamed and he screamed, and so the police came running down through the trees to the creek with their guns drawn. That made him scream some more. There were two cops. One was youngish, and skinny. The other was older, and chubby.
Coco’s mom snapped, “Put those things away, you’re scaring him!”
“Oh my God,” the older cop said. “I didn’t believe it. That’s Tim Jenkins.”
The younger one holstered his gun. The older one kept his in his hand, looking at the moving shadows of the trees, of the water. “Whoever the kid got away from can’t be far. What’s he said?”
“Nothing that makes sense, Bill,” Ollie’s dad said soothingly. Coco was still getting used to how people in Evansburg all knew each other. “Look, just put it away, why don’t you? Whoever it was is hardly going to try anything with all of us here, even if they are nearby. You’re scaring him.” Tim still hadn’t let go of Mr. Adler. “It’s all right, son,” Mr. Adler said to Tim. “You’re safe.”
“What happened, Roger?” Bill said.
“Don’t know. The boy appeared in the creek. Alone. Hysterical.”
“The lights,” Tim whispered.
Suddenly Coco understood. “It’s your cars. He’s scared of the emergency lights.”
Both the older and the younger policeman gave her skeptical looks.
But unexpectedly, Coco’s mom said, “She might be right. Wasn’t he taken from a carnival? That has flashing lights too. It’s residual trauma. Turn them off, for God’s sake, and see if it helps.”
“Now, listen, lady,” began the older policeman, Bill. The younger one merely raised an eyebrow.
Coco’s mom looked annoyed. “Don’t lady me, Officer. I am a journalist for the Evansburg Independent, and I’m already taking notes for the article that will be on the front page tomorrow morning. So try turning off your lights for thirty seconds and see if he calms down.”
They did. Tim stopped shaking. He lifted his head. “You’re safe now,” Mr. Adler said again. But Coco could see Tim Jenkins’s face. He sure didn’t look like he thought he was safe.
He didn’t say anything else.
It was nearly dark by the time the three of them left the swimming hole. The police wanted statements. Bill, the older policeman, was salty and serious and kept touching the butt of his gun. The younger guy’s name was Luke Fier, and he was nice. He took their statements. “Came running right up the river? Why do you think that was? Any signs of an unknown vehicle?”
“No,” the grown-ups said.
“Saying a few odd things, though,” Ollie’s dad put in. “Something about keys. And he kept repeating three words: ghost, mirror, gate. Any ideas there?”
Officer Fier looked thoughtful. “None at all.”
He took a statement from Coco too. “Kids see things that the grown-ups miss all the time,” he said. “All right, tell me what happened in your own words.”
Coco chose her words carefully. “Well, I was on the ledge just under the bridge . . .” She went through the story. But she left a lot out. Like: I’m pretty sure I know who kidnapped Tim. I might even know who set him loose. It’s the same person. The worst person you’ll ever meet. I know these are the opening moves of a game—like an opening gambit in chess—but I don’t know the rules.
“Any suspects?” the policeman asked, breaking into her fast-running thoughts. The shadows were gathering by then. She couldn’t see him properly anymore. Just the movement of his encouraging smile and his hand grasping the pencil.
Coco wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Why would you think I know a suspect? Tim disappeared in Rutland, didn’t he? That’s, like, fifty miles from here!”
“Never know. Thank you for your time. Evening, miss. Ma’am.” Luke Fier sauntered away.
4
Three months before
THE CARNIVAL TRAVELED by train, and Olivia Adler traveled with it. She never knew where they were. The landscape flickered by. It was sometimes urban, and sometimes wild. Sometimes sunlit, sometimes ghostly. But there were never any landmarks she recognized.
One car of the train was Ollie’s. That was the only part of the train she saw. It had a bedroom with a brass bed, a tiny bathroom. An old-fashioned living room with ratty velvet covers on the chairs.
She had an awful cold, in May, the first time she woke up and found herself on the train. Not surprising, since her last memory before that was of jumping, fully dressed, into Lake Champlain.
She woke up alone. The nightstand beside her held a neat pile of cold medicine, a glass of water, and a bowl of soup. Her throat hurt. Her head hurt. She drank her soup, went to sleep, woke up, found tea on her nightstand, drank that. Went back to sleep, woke up, and she was well. The bedroom had a chest of drawers. She found white dresses in it, neatly folded, with yellowing lace and a faint smell of dried roses, as though the dresses had been there a long time and belonged to someone else. She didn’t put one on. She stuck with her grubby jeans, her purple hoodie. Tried the door to her bedroom.
It opened, and she found a living room on the other side. Old-fashioned as anything. Gas lamps instead of light bulbs. Chairs covered with moth-eaten brown velvet. Silky yellow wallpaper. A round, scratched table with lion-paw legs. A fire burning in the fireplace, even though May was too late in the year, really, for fires.
Ollie was staring into the fire when he appeared. The smiling man. He stepped through a door at the far end of the room. She knew him instantly. Strange, because if someone had asked, she wouldn’t have known how to describe him. He swapped names, after all. He swapped faces. Fair hair? Well. Sort of. Pale eyes? Maybe, but they changed with the light.
However, his expression stayed the same. He always looked like he was enjoying a joke and only he knew the punch line.
“Hello, Olivia.”
He’d saved her dad’s life. He’d also kidnapped Ollie. But was it kidnapping if that was the bargain they’d made? What did you say to someone like that? “Um—hi.”
He gestured at the round table. It had a chess set laid out. “Would you like to play?”
She didn’t move. She was trying to think. A million questions ran through her head. She asked the most important one. “Is my dad okay? Are my friends okay?”
“Yes.”
“Where am I?”
“On a train.”
“Where are we going?”
He put his head to one side. “Here and there. Do you want to play or not?”
Ollie swallowed. You decided to do this, Ollie. You called him, you told him you’d do what he wanted if he saved your dad’s life. And he did, and here you are. Are you going to start getting scared now? Maybe he’ll tell you things, if you’re clever. You don’t even know where you are.
“Okay. I’ll play.” Somehow, it seemed like the phrase meant more than Yes, I’ll play chess.
“Wonderful.” His smile was kind. Warm. That was the thing you had to remember about the smiling man. Sometimes his smiles were scary, and sometimes they were friendly, but they never meant what you thought they did.
They played chess every evening after that, at the lion-paw table, sitting on the ratty velvet chairs. She didn’t know for how many days. Two weeks at least. The train went on without stopping. Soon spring would be turning to summer back in Evansburg. The chess set was nice. Heavy pieces, of black and white stone. He was better at chess than she was, but he’d spot her a knight or a bishop. Then they were pretty even.
He liked to play chess. Genuinely liked it, Ollie thought. He liked games, and he liked figuring out people’s weaknesses. Sometimes she wondered—and this was a strange thought—if he didn’t have anyone else to play with.
Sometimes he joked, in a dry, malicious sort of way. Sometimes she even laughed. He knew strange stories. She wondered which ones were true.
The train chugged on, endlessly.
Her meals appeared on the round table in the living room. She never saw who left them. There was a bookcase in the living room. It had good books in it. She found Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, Beauty, Coraline. She wondered if there had been another kid traveling on the train who liked to read, or if the smiling man just had good taste in books. She would read by the window and watch the landscape outside. She saw graveyards sometimes. Gray trees. Shabby houses, and a square tower on a lonely hill. Once she saw a row of skeletons hanging from the same branch, bony feet stirring in the wind. She jerked back from the window, shivering.
Sometimes she wondered if she’d keep riding the train until school started, until winter break, until a year passed. Until she grew up. That thought scared her. She missed her dad. She missed her friends, her house, the smell of the woods. Her life.
But Dad’s alive, she reminded herself. It was worth it.
Some time after she arrived—three weeks? She wasn’t sure—Ollie moved a pawn and asked, “Does the train ever stop?”
The smiling man moved a knight. His abstracted gaze was on the chessboard. “It will stop tomorrow.”
“It will? Then what happens?”
“You’ll see.” He seemed to know what she was wondering. He added cheerfully, “You’ll be able to walk around. Won’t that be nice?”
She almost didn’t believe him. It seemed like the train had to stay in motion. Like a shark. Couldn’t exist without the shifting scenery outside her clouded window.
But when she woke up the next morning, the train had stopped. It felt like there was something wrong with the floor at first. And then she realized that they weren’t moving and ran to the window.
She was still in her bedroom on the train. She had to look around to be sure. She was. But now her window was fifty feet in the air, and she was looking out at a—glass castle? Her astonished gaze darted left and right. Not a glass castle—a mirrored funhouse. She saw a Tilt-A-Whirl. A Ferris wheel. Saw that it was summer. You couldn’t mistake the yellow quality of the light. She’d gotten on the train in May. But now it was June, at least. And there was a carnival spread out at her feet. Laughter floated up to her window. People—families, ordinary families, with kids—were coming through the carnival gates.
Could she go out to them? Talk to someone? Find out where they were?
What day was it? How had the carnival gotten here? Was it on the train the whole time?
She tied back her cloud of corkscrewing hair and darted from her bedroom. A meal was waiting for her on the table in the living room, but she ignored it. She dashed to the far door. She’d tried it before, of course, but it was locked. This time the knob turned, and she found herself on a dusty landing, with a narrow staircase. She took the stairs downward two at a time. Came to another landing, with a cobwebby door opening off. A sign on the door said scraps. Another time, she would have stopped to explore—she’d had no idea that any of this was here. Her rooms had been on a train car yesterday. But now all she could think of was getting outside, into the warm summer light, and talking to real people.
Another flight of steps, and then she came to a pair of doors. One said parts (beware), but the other door said exit. She wasn’t touching any door that said beware. Ollie tried the exit door, found it unlocked, and ran outside.
The smell of sugar and hot oil hit her nose. Sunlight felt wonderful on the back of her neck. Bright, blaring music came from unseen speakers. She turned to see the building she’d just left. The building looked like a carnival ride that had broken but was just kept around anyway. A sign in front said haunted house. The façade was peeling. Cobwebs festooned the windows. On the roof was a huge statue of a skeleton. But it was a skeleton dressed as a clown. Its skull mouth was painted red. It wore a frizzy red wig. Red spots on its cheeks.
Another time it would have scared her, that she’d been living in a haunted house. But she was so happy to be out in bright daylight, and so eager to talk to someone. Anyone.
Ollie ducked between two booths and came out onto a vibrant carnival midway. People were pouring in through the gates. Kids spilled drinks in frosty cups, gobbled handfuls of chocolates. Smeared the candy on their faces. The Ferris wheel spun, sparkling.
One o’ clock, HA HA HA, someone bellowed. Ollie turned, saw that in the very center of the midway was a giant clown holding a clock in its two gloved hands. It had shouted the hour.
Carnies beckoned from each game booth, grinning.
I don’t understand. Is all this—his? What is this place? The smiling man travels with a carnival? After everything—scarecrows and ghosts and monsters—he travels with a carnival? It didn’t seem like him. The carnival was beautiful. It seemed like fun.
Ollie reminded herself to be wary. The smiling man was tricky. And she hadn’t forgotten his first question to her: Would you like to play? Maybe he’d been talking about chess. But maybe he hadn’t been. And if they were playing a game now, she didn’t know the rules.
She passed a merry-go-round, full of fantastic animals. Watched the Tilt-A-Whirl spin. Stared at the flags and turrets of the funhouse. Wandered through the game booths. There was archery where you had to shoot little mechanical dolls as they ran back and forth. There was a ring toss where you had to throw tiny life-preserver rings over more mechanical dolls half-submerged in a rippling black pool.
Ollie stopped at the ring toss, eyes on the attendant. Were the carnies all—his? His—what—employees? Did they travel on the train too? Were they his prisoners? His friends? She watched them mistrustfully. The carny at the ring-toss booth was tall and wide. He wore dull, nondescript clothes. His face was pale, almost ashy. His teeth were yellowish. His hair frizzy. “Hey,” Ollie said to him, but he didn’t hear. He was beckoning some kids over.
